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How I Escaped Toxic Ambition
Sometimes the goal is the enemy of the work
I find myself in an odd place in life: I’m completely detached from future outcomes. When I’ve told people this, they’ve asked, “So you don’t have any goals?” I can only give them an iffy response like, “Kind of.”
When I was younger, my whole thinking life was spent in an imagined future. I was ambitious and egotistical. I’d tell everyone about all the great things I was going to accomplish, and I’d get teary eyed thinking about it myself. Heck, I even wrote a book on ambition, A Guide for Ambitious People.
Then, life beat the living heck out of me. It’s been failure after failure the whole way down. Even when I had a company that was starting to turn a profit, I had a heart condition (in my 20s!) take me out of the game for a time, until I was able to get corrective surgery. I had to sell off everything in the meantime.
Nothing worked. I’d have a series of existential crises as I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was. Fast forward to my 30s. After a nightmare of a relationship, I was left broke, emotionally dead inside, and alone.
I’m not going to lie to you and say a switch flipped, and I achieved enlightenment right then and there. It was months of…
